498 american ethnologist the relationship of diaspora communities to their homelands. Those who believe in the myth oi return are confronted with its real- ity—diasporic Adyge peoples oi Israel meet their brethren in the Caucuses where they negotiate some commonality oi identity in the face oi material, political, and cultural differences. This article provides an excel- lent comparison for studies oi returning for peoples in long-term diasporas and points to interesting comparative data for the Circas- sian Jordanian diaspora. Two articles by Emma Martin and Judith Shuval add a theoretical dimension, but the concept of globalization seems tangential to their central arguments. Martin asks why eth- nicity—all but ignored by scholars in the 1960s—has, since the 1980s, suddenly come to the fore as a causal explanation for social conflicts, ethnicity now replacing so- cial class as the favored paradigm. Martin's Marxist perspective is inherently a global one; yet, in the end, she mainly criticizes scholarship and its underlying politics. Shuval reflects on the self-imposed isola- tion oi Israeli migration scholars, who have typically viewed the Israeli case as unique. She argues that Israeli migration scholarship should be included in mainstream analysis because globalization has brought about a convergence oi experience (between Israel and other industrialized nations). She raises interesting possibilities for fruitful compari- sons on immigration policies and ethnic plu- ralism in multicultural states. Virtually anything can be related to a global context or globalization. As a number oi scholars have noted, globalization is not a new phenomenon. What is new, however, is that scholars are directly engaging that con- text, viewing globalization as a force in con- structing knowledges, identities, ethnicities, and the like. Global processes are the pre- conditions of these constructions. Using global context enables one to offset pro- grammatic and essentialist paradigms and to include multiple viewpoints and interests that otherwise tend to be flattened. It is im- portant to apply and test theories of the global through case studies. Many oi these contributions are suitable to this kind of task, but few of the authors have undertaken it. Rednecks, Eggheads and Blackfellas: A Study of Racial Power and Intimacy in Australia. Gil- lian Cowlishaw. Ann Arbor: University oi Michigan Press, 1999. ix + 352 pp., maps, fig- ures, notes, bibliography, index. MICHELE DOMINY Bard College Gillian Cowlishaw tells a "tragic colonial tale" (p. 299), not through images and texts but through "voices from the outback with other things to say" (p. 301). In relating this important tale oi the racial frontier and revealing the on- going racial and cultural hierarchy orches- trated by the Australian state, she relies on 24 years of ethnographic work with the Rembar- rnga people oi Bulman in southern Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory and 80 years oi archival materials, primarily from the Austra- lian Archives in Darwin. Cowlishaw presents the consequences of the state's refusal to rec- ognize and engage Otherness by documenting the concrete historical and cultural conditions within which official policy and practice failed to engage in embodied interaction and dia- logue with the Rembarrnga people. She leaves unresolved what the state might do when con- fronted with the radical alterity that is her fo- cus, providing readers instead with a pioneer- ing moral argument about the state's "bad faith" (p. 299): "colonial authority has repro- duced itself in new and ever more modern and progressive guises, and has tried to divest itself of the stigma of colonial rule" (p. 297). Today, Cowlishaw suggests, liberal discourse is the state's latest progressive guise. Cowlishaw's voices are personal, multiple, and interwoven, moving back and forth in time and space in ways that demand close atten- tion. The voices belong to the rednecks and blackfellas who populate the pastoral industry on the Mainoru and Gulperan cattle stations in the Bulman area, and to the eggheads oi the state bureaucracy and its scientific institutions (including anthropologists). Drawing on oral history, documents, and observation, Cowli- shaw illustrates how the state's creation and manipulation of racial categories regulated in- teraction in the outback through focusing on players such as Jack Mackay (owner oi Mai- noru); Mrs. Margaret Dodd, Jack's sister and a schoolteacher at Mainoru; patrol officer Ron Ryan, who assisted the anthropologist A. P. Elkin in his work at Mainoru in the 1950s; Tex Camfoo, aboriginal supervisor for the Gulperan